"For scientists, imagining a world without arXiv is like the rest of us imagining one without public libraries or GPS. But a look at its inner workings reveals that it isn’t a frictionless utopia of open-access knowledge. Over the years, arXiv’s permanence has been threatened by everything from bureaucratic strife to outdated code to even, once, a spy scandal. In the words of Ginsparg, who usually redirects interview requests to an FAQ document—on arXiv, no less—and tried to talk me out of visiting him in person, arXiv is “a child I sent off to college but who keeps coming back to camp out in my living room, behaving badly.”
Ginsparg and I met over the course of several days last spring in Ithaca, New York, home of Cornell University. I’ll admit, I was apprehensive ahead of our time together. Geoffrey West, a former supervisor of Ginsparg’s at Los Alamos National Laboratory, once described him as “quite a character” who is “infamous in the community” for being “quite difficult.” He also said he was “extremely funny” and a “great guy.” In our early email exchanges, Ginsparg told me, upfront, that stories about arXiv never impress him: “So many articles, so few insights,” he wrote."
https://www.wired.com/story/inside-arxiv-most-transformative-code-science/
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